Monday, September 06, 2010

0th, The Fine Brothers. (Mostly about the flak YouTube earners got [due to jealousy], but also this:) How many people truly want to watch short form television style content inside the web? We’ll tell you how many. TONS. Hundreds of thousands, millions, but you know why they don’t watch your show? Because you have not built a connection to them, because you haven’t built a personal brand and experience for them to climb aboard and want to support, because you don’t have a real reason for the show to be distributed online beyond just “making something”, and surprisingly a lot of the time because you haven’t created a very good show not just for the web, but for any platform.

1st, Barrett Garese. Stop making short-TV or short-films and putting it online and calling it "online entertainment". It's derivative, and TV does it better already.

2nd, Barret's followup. We’re going to start having to think of the medium first, and the story second.

3rd, David Nett. Where Barrett is wrong, in my opinion, is in the underlying assumption in his tip: that we want to be pioneers in online entertainment. Rather than whipping ourselves into a frenzy over Barrett’s perfectly sound advice, I believe a creator should ask him or herself plainly, “what am I trying to make? Am I trying to make a TV show, and the web is the best current distribution option for my show?” If the answer is yes, then in my opinion Barrett’s advice simply doesn’t apply.

4th, Marc Hustvedt. There’s a flawed point of logic in the argument that web video should always be something different than what’s on TV or film.

Finally, New Mediacracy (via) which lead me to the others. Barrett Garese, Brett Register, Craig Frank, Jamie Blair, along with NM regulars Chris McCaleb, Zadi Diaz, and Steve Woolf get together. Conversation really needed David and Marc, but what do you want? Your money back?

Friday, July 23, 2010

So, I have sleep apnea, which means that I stop breathing in my sleep.

I went through a sleep study, and got a CPAP. So I won't die in my sleep.

But it wouldn't be a blog post if that's all that happened. ^_^

My nose is all messed up (partly because of genetics, and partly possibly because of the bike accident three years ago). Recently, one side closed up and I can't really breathe through it. At night, the other side closes up as well, meaning I couldn't use the CPAP. So... that's bad.

My ENT recommended surgery to fix my deviated septum and reduce my turbinates (this is after multiple meetings and tests; I really don't like surgery). This should allow me to breathe through both sides again, and if it doesn't fix my apnea it will at least let me use the CPAP. So I won't die in my sleep.

So my surgery was scheduled for yesterday afternoon. Something I didn't really think about beforehand was that I couldn't have any coffee that morning. I've had surgery before, but it was way early in the morning so this wasn't an issue. Oh man, I sure love coffee though.

ANOTHER thing I didn't think of was that I would have all morning to worry about the upcoming operation. So I was probably more nervous for this one than the previous one. And did I mention the lack of coffee? Coffee...

But that wouldn't be enough for a Phoenix story.

I'm at the surgery center, getting interviewed by the anesthesiologist. I'm moments away from being put under.

And the fire alarm goes off.

And it eventually becomes clear that this is not just a drill. The entire building is evacuated into the parking lot.

Luckily no one was in surgery at the time (only because I was a couple minutes behind schedule), but two people were in recovery and their unconscious forms wheeled out on gurneys. How awesome would that be to wake up from surgery in the sunny outdoors? A firetruck came and the firemen went through a quick building inspection. While we were waiting, I lamented that I didn't have a camera with me, but a nurse had her phone on her and snapped a couple photos of me and my IV. UNFORTUNATELY they didn't save properly, so I still ended up with no pictures.

So that's the surgery adventure. I'd write more, but I'm doped up on vicodin right now.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

I've been working on my thesis again, having slacked off a lot the past few months. But having slacked off for so long, it's only recently that I discovered that I have misplaced one of my notebooks. That's pretty bad. But things get worse.

Yesterday, I needed a bookmark from XP. I upgraded to Windows 7 in January and haven't really used XP much since then. But I use Zotero to manage my references, so I do all my thesis research in Firefox.

So, I browse to my Firefox profile on the XP partition. The directory is empty.

...What.

Well, empty except the profile.ini file. Which points to the Firefox directory on the old Vista partition. And that's when I remember...

See, I had been hoping back and forth between XP and Vista. I had used only Vista for about a year, since it came with my lappy, but I had some problems (especially with games and older software). So when I re-formatted my computer last year, I put XP back on and swapped back and forth. Except I really didn't all that often. XP was fine and Vista was a headache, so I really pretty much only used XP> BUT, what I had done was, I had set up the Firefox profile to be the same on both (and in Linux when I booted to that). So, no matter which OS I was in at the time, I'd have all my bookmarks and recent tabs, seamlessly.

Which I FORGOT when I put W7 on. See, by that point I wasn't using Vista at all. So, while I made a careful backup of all my XP stuff (just in case), I didn't back up the Vista stuff (because, there wasn't any). Except, there WAS, because that's where all the Firefox stuff was stored.

So, all I have now is a profile.ini that points to a partition that no longer exists, and my most recent other backup is from 2008 (before I started on this current thesis). All because I was too clever for my own good. Sweet.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

So, recently, Roger Ebert (whom, to be clear, I adore) once again declared that video games are not art, and CAN NEVER BE!

Which is absurd. Of COURSE games can be art. Everything about Shadow of the Colossus is art, not just the fantastic visuals, not just the story, but even down to the controller itself! But it's clear that Ebert has never played SotC. (This, despite it being mentioned several times in reader responses the first time he brought this up). His initial argument is "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control." But, games like SotC has its plot on rails; the player has "choices" but really, the player has to move the plot forward. If the player goes off exploring, the game pretty much just waits. Ebert just appears to be completely unfamiliar with the wide range of games and gametypes available (he also appears to believe that ALL games have winners and losers, which has never been true).

He also never played Braid, although he knows enough about it to discounts its possibility as art. Well, I say he knows about it, but clearly his opinion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the premise. Ebert's entire article was prompted by Kellee Santiago's TED talk (which you can see here). Here is a quote from his piece:

Her next example is a game named "Braid". This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Braid doesn't allow you to go back in time and correct your mistakes, it FORCES you to go back in time and correct your mistakes. That's a fundamental part of the game mechanic, arguably the entire POINT of the game. It's not 'taking back a move' and negating the discipline of the game, it IS the game! And his remark about 'wordy fortune cookies' is another indicator that he never played it. Yes, you are given tiny snippets of a story, but the larger story becomes clear as you play. If he HAD played Braid, he would understand that.

So let's talk about Chess (which he also mentioned). Santiago says that Chess isn't art, and can't be art, because it's just a set of rules. No matter how elegant the set of rules, it's not art. Fine. I'm not going to argue that point. So, let's try this thought experiment:

Imagine there is a PLAY about Chess. The actors dress up like the pieces, you can have fights between the white pawn and the red knight, eventually one king is killed and the play is over. You don't see the chessboard itself, the play is just using a Chess theme.

Can that be art? Of course. A play can be art, even if its theme comes from a game.

So, now imagine that towards the end of the play, the white king can send his knight or his queen to fight the red bishop. OK? Both parts are scripted, but it's up to the audience to shout out their preference for that performance. The play has two different endings, depending on the outcome. Everything else about the play is the same.

Can that still be art? I think so. The presence of a choice by the audience does not negate everything else in the play. The audience's choice isn't the art, it's still the writing/acting/etc.

So, now imagine that the audience has a choice twice during the play. Or three times. Or twenty. Everything else is still true, there are scripted scenes for the players to act out. Eventually, the audience could have enough choices to play an entire game of Chess.

Is that still art? Again, I think so. There doesn't come a point where the fact that the audience has choices negates the art in the rest of the play, because the art is NOT about their choices! The art is always about the play, and what is shown to the audience.

It is the same with video games. The art isn't about the player's choices, it's about everything else.

As the Penny Arcade guys said, Ebert's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history. And that makes me sad.

I was on Facebook today, and noticed that I had a friend request from Lauren Hudson (from April 8th, if that gives you an idea of how often I check Facebook. Which is never, actually, I was only on because I noticed a friend request from Ken). So, who is Lauren Hudson?

I'm not sure.

BUT, I saw that I had 15 mutual friends with her. So, I looked at that list, and they were predominantly people from the CEB, or people associated with people from the CEB. Unfortunately, I couldn't see Lauren's full profile unless we were friends. So I accepted a friend request from someone I didn't know (this is the first time I've intentionally done that).

Well, only the single photo (the profile picture), sparse Info (18 year old bisexual interested in friendship, dating, and networking), and that's pretty much it. She has close to 900 friends though. And the messages on her wall...

Washington Leifii dont know you.... but hey thanks for the add..... we should get to know eachother.....

And (I assume) so on. Most of the wall posts are like that. So, this is the future we live in, where bots pretend to be 18 year old bisexuals in order to gain our friendship. Oh robot, you know me so well.

Does anyone else remember when Facebook was an actually great, functional site? It's a shame that great, functional, helpful sites don't make as much money as spam-filled social crapfests.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

I can't believe I'm still awake at nearly midnight, as I got up around 3am. This is what happens when I get in the groove on the computer and lose all track of time. It's also how my sleep schedule gets all out of whack.

Choices, choices. Get up early tomorrow (and be groggy all day, but have a normal sleeping schedule), OR sleep in (wake up refreshed, but slide my rhythms around until I'm up at night and sleeping in the daytime).

BECAUSE I keep forgetting what it's called, here's a post I can look for later. This morning I was trying to remember what it's called when someone takes an image, and you see a sequence of zooms, usually to a close-up of someone's face. Apparently, that's a Tenso.

The word “tenso” is Portuguese for “tense”. This is a meme that spread through Brazilian blogs and forums in 2009, and consists of an image edited to form a sequence that closes up the frame and emphasizes a “tense” face or situation.

(Thanks, KnowYourMeme!)

This post is what brought it up, and culminated in me making the following Tenso:

So, The Passing is still not out for the PC, despite being April 22nd for over 7 hours now. I should be happy that it's going to be free for me, as the XBOX360 version costs cashy money (an edict by Microsoft, because they don't want XBOX customers getting accustomed to getting things for free. Really.), but the XBOX crowd already has theirs. I imagine it can't possibly be more than a few more hours away though, as VALVe employees are scheduled to play games with us commonfolk starting at 11am PDT. So here's another post to past the time.

Let's talk about Tumblr.

I like(d) Tumblr, and you can see a bit from my Tumblr feed there on the left (below the Shared Items). But what I REALLY like(d) about Tumblr is the Popular page.

Don't bother clicking that link, it doesn't go anywhere anymore.

What the Popular page USED TO be was a list of all the popular images/posts that week. Which ones got the most likes/reblogs. It was great, and there was usually tons of highly entertaining stuff I hadn't come across on there.

Well, apparently Tumblr didn't like being a popularity contest, so that feature was recently cut, and with it pretty much my sole reason to use Tumblr. It has been replaced with a way to recommend individual Tumblogs. Well, I don't CARE about Tumblogs. There are TOO MANY of those. I just want the best pictures and posts. I'm not going to follow each recommended Tumblog hoping to run across cool stuff. I don't have that kind of time.

See, the Internet, it's BIG. And it's just FILLED with stuff, most of which is complete crap. That's how things work. But some stuff is awesome, which is why sites like Digg and Reddit are so popular. They go through all that stuff and people pick out the things they like, and if enough people like it, it's highlighted for everyone else to see. That's also how Tumblr's Popular page worked.

But without that filter, without any method to highlight the cool from the crap, the Internet is just white noise.

In my recent Magic and Not A Spiral posts, I used mouse rollovers to help illustrate the differences between two images. For anyone else who uses Blogger and wants to know how, here is a handy guide.

First, Blogger doesn't (easily) allow Javascript, so this will be pure CSS. Second, I wanted the rollover code in the post to be as small and repeatable as possible. So, I used Tables (gasp!).

There are two pieces of formatting code.

Piece Number OneThis goes in Layout | Edit HTML, somewhere in the CSS layout. If you don't know what the CSS layout is, ....you probably shouldn't be playing around in the HTML. So, this guide is not for you. For everyone else, here's what to paste in:

What this does is, when you create a table with the "rollover" class, it will hide any image inside the table, which will leave any background image visible. It also removes table and image borders, as my normal layout has those.

Piece Number TwoNow, whenever you want to include a rollover image, all you have to do is use:

Set "rolloverimage" to the url of the image you want displayed when the mouse is over, and "regularimage" to what you want shown normally. (I don't remember why I put height=73 in there, but it works for any size image [except maybe those with height less than 73?]).

Voilà, pure CSS rollovers usable on Blogger. And here are some examples in action, using Calvin re-enacted by seefresh's lovely wife.

Good morning, world! I love getting up before the sun, especially that part where I can stalk around my apartment like a cat, seeing everything so clearly in just the ambient light. What I don't like is the fact that I live in Cheney and absolutely no stores are open right now. So I'm going to pass some time on the computer.

First up, how do I UNSEE something? Somewhere along the line, I became aware of fake-consumption in TV shows. People "drink" from empty cups and "eat" with nothing in their mouth. I was reminded of this last night while watching LOST, when Sawyer "ate" an apple, but really it's epidemic. I watch a lot of police-procedurals, where they "drink" a lot of coffee, and it's always so SO obvious! They should start filling those empty cups with water at least, so the actors remember they can't be tossing them around.

The WORST offender was probably White Collar, another police-procedural (and one of my favorite variations, the cop+civilian team [see also: Castle, The Mentalist, Bones, Lie To Me]). There was an episode of White Collar where it was an actual plot point whether or not a glass of wine was poisoned/drugged. So the woman took a "sip". Now, this is with a crystal-clear glass, and we can all SEE that she didn't drink anything! ARGH!

Of course, this is the same show with the set-design so poor that when they close the doors in the office, the entire wall swings precariously (very visible in the first episode). Their solution? For the rest of the season, they never closed the door. And when a scene called for the door to be closed, they would foley a door-closed sound with the door a few inches open. Which we could see. There was even a shot THROUGH the gap at a character outside the office. It's like, it's like the whole THING was a joke! Arglebargle!

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

I wondered why it seemed to spiral in counter-clockwise. Dan suspected that it was the orientation of the corner diamonds, so I made a second image with the black and white squares reversed, which you can see below (mouse-over the original). Does it reverse the spiral for you?

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Content-Aware Fill is making the rounds. Here is yet another example video: Show/Hide

Mwahaha

And stunningly, it turns out that the basic technology (texture synthesis) has been around FOR A DECADE. That's right, nerds in the know were running magic in GIMP ten years before Adobe posted their sneak peak at CS5. The upcoming Photoshop with this magic isn't yet available, but the GIMP version is right now (resynthesizer and heal selection), so I thought I'd run it through its paces. I couldn't find the original hi-res photos anywhere (0 results on TinEye), so I had to make-due with screencaps from the original video.

(rollover for originals)

In the first picture, everything except the sky was an easy Heal Selection. The sky didn't turn out right, and I ended up using clone-stamp to cover up the weirdness, and then Heal Selection over that.

For the desert, again I had to clone-stamp part of the scrub-brush over the road first, and then Heal Selection over that.

Finally, for the panorama (which was actually the first image I tried), I didn't use anything except Heal Selection, BUT I had to do the picture in steps (first one corner, then the next, etc).

So what did I find? Well, although the Resynthesizer tool 'works', it's not nearly as easy to use as what is shown in the CS5 preview video. And some of the results were a little wonky. But it's fairly quick and easy, and the output will usually pass a quick glance (but not intense scrutiny).

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Caught up on a bit of telly this evening, including the latest QI and Psych.

On QI, there was the old canard about if you fired a bullet and dropped it simultaneously, which would hit the ground first? The standard answer is, they would hit at the same time.

Except, that's not strictly true. They would essentially hit at the same time, but not precisely. The fired bullet would hit ever so slightly after the dropped bullet. Stephen even admitted that if the bullet were going FAST enough, it would leave the atmosphere. So, at one speed does it go from hitting the ground at exactly the same time as a dropped bullet, and NEVER hitting the ground? It only takes a moment's thought to work out that it must land slightly later. The greater the speed, the greater the delay, until it reaches a velocity that takes it out of the atmosphere. BUT, since a bullet's speed is never going to be THAT great, the delay is hardly measurable. It's like how a spring weighs slightly more compressed than uncompressed; the difference is so small it is hard to quantify. But it's there.

The bullet blunder on Psych was much more egregious, although technically it was a tree transgression. In this episode, they found a bullet embedded high in a tree. It got that high due to the tree's growth over the years. However, trees do not grow in this manner. Despite the widely held belief to the contrary, trees actually grow from the top. All parts of a tree (branches, embedded evidence, etc) will stay pretty much at the same height, no matter how much time passes.

I watched these two shows back-to-back. I'm beginning to wonder if too much education lessens the enjoyment I would otherwise get from television.

Monday, February 08, 2010

Just getting home from job training today. It was long (even though we got out early), but it was a lot of fun. It was mostly women, which was interesting, because they were all swooning over me. One of them even tried to hook me up with her 21-year-old daughter.

However, now that I'm home, I've gotten a glimpse of what I look like in the mirror. See, I overslept this morning, and had to rush to class (and even then, I was late). So I skipped the shower.

So my hair is a mess and I'm unshaven. It's =CLEAR= that I still have bed-head. I look ridiculous, actually, from my perspective.

So what's the deal? Is slovenly a desired look now? Have I been washing up just TOO well? All that wasted effort! And, no wonder that I'm still single!

Friday, February 05, 2010

"I've got a story to tell you. It's a good one, too. Imagine, 1962, rural village of Kashasha, Tanzania. Girl's boarding school. Girl is sitting in class.

She begins to laugh.

The girl next to her, maybe to her left, hears her laugh and she begins to laugh.

Across the classroom a third girl joins in, the teacher gets upset, but it's too late. Soon four girls, and eight -- the entire class has begun to laugh, and then cry, and then laugh, and then cry..."

"At what?"

"Just 'cause, I don't know. Anyhow, a girl outside at that moment walking down the hall, imagine she hears the laughter from the classroom. She starts to laugh, and as she walks and laughs her laughter goes into other classrooms, and soon the whole school is doing this: laughing, crying, laughing, crying... Teachers cannot control these girls; when they try to, the girls get violent!"

"They get violent?"

"Yup. The principal then has no choice, he's gotta close the school.

They open the school a week later, and it happens again. So they close the school a second time.

Meanwhile, the girls who started all this, they go back to their villages many many miles away, and this ... thing, whatever it is, spreads. Up and down the coast of Lake Victoria..."

"You mean people in the villages start to laugh?"

"Yup. In one village, 217 people start to laugh and cry. A second boarding school has to shut down.

I had never heard Radio Lab before (the only other NPR show I've really gotten into is This American Life, and even then I prefer the video adaptation). But now I suddenly =get= why people listen to NPR.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

So, the latest Joss Whedon project has come to a close with the recent Dollhouse finale. Most of the loose ends were tied up, but one thing really bothered me: It's 10 years later, right? Wherefore does everyone look pretty much exactly the same as before? I mean, even down to HAIRSTYLE?

People's looks change a lot in ten years. Here's a picture of me just five years ago:

Now, compare that to a picture I took of myself this morning:

And that's after only FIVE years! Throughout the finale I had to keep reminding myself that this was 10 years after the previous episode. Could have been so much better.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

I was playing on the computer, and experienced a Blue Screen shutdown. :-(

So, taking a break from the computer, I pick up my DS and play Rittai Picross for about an hour, and the battery dies. (The power indicator light supposedly changes color when this is going to happen, but being colorbind renders this warning void).

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

I got a parking ticket today, my 2nd in recent memory (the other one was Nov. 4th). And of course, I blame Microsoft for this.

See, I had never gotten a parking ticket before November 4th. In fact, I've been parking at meters for YEARS without getting a ticket. What has changed?

My phone.

Previously, I used a Nokia 6800. This was one of the early semi-smart phones (e-mail, limited web access, and a flip-out keyboard), more phone than smart though. But still cutting-edge for its time (2003). And it had a bunch of handy features, one of which was a very simple countdown timer... that was TWO BUTTONS AWAY. That's it. 1st press quick-features, 2nd press timer. I used it when doing laundry, when cooking, and yes, when parking at a meter.

And then the phone died.

Right now, I'm using an ATT Tilt, and it is pretty much the worst phone I've ever used. It runs Windows CE, and tries to be a PDA and a phone. But it's more dumb than phone.

Everything is controlled via the stylus. There are buttons, but they are all context-sensitive. Which means that you don't necessarily know what each one will do in a given situation (and they don't all have display reminders either. It's more, press it and see what it does, and then don't press it again ever).

SO, if I want to run a timer application, I have to get out the stylus, click on the start menu, go to Applications, go to Tools, browse to the timer app, and start it. OH WAIT THERE *IS* NO TIMER APP! That's right, such complicated functionality is too much for this mini-computer. I'd have to find one on the Internet, download it to my computer, install the phone-computer interface software, and install it to the phone that way (in which case, it installs to the Applications folder UNDER APPLICATIONS. Yeah, you have to select Applications TWICE to run it). EVEN though the phone itself can browse the Internet when I'm in a hotspot, I can't install applications that way.

It's like a committee tried to come up with all the ways they could to mess with people. "How can we make our product even MORE DIFFICULT to use?"

I'm not even mad at the ticket writer, even though he clearly waited at my car for the meter to run out (based on the time on the ticket). He was just doing his job.

So I need to buy a new phone. I had been hesitating because of the expense, but at this rate I would be saving money in the long run to buy one now. Maybe the Nexus?